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How Do You Detect Cheating In Chess? Watch the Computer
First time accepted submitter Shaterri writes "Which is more likely: that a low-ranked player could play through a high-level tournament at grandmaster level, or that they were getting undetected assistance from a computer? How about when that player is nearly strip-searched with no devices found? How about when their moves correlate too well with independent computer calculations? Ken Regan has a fascinating article on one of the most complex (potential) cheating cases to come along in recent memory."
If you win against a computer you are cheating
Done.
A simple wireless enabled butt plug and knowledge of Morse code or similar encoding is all that would be required. Unless they scanned the entire frequency spectrum and found nothing, meaning that nobody in the room had an electronic device that radiates, then my good friend Occam thinks this is likely to be the answer.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
There are techniques in cheating, easy to apply and safe from proof that can be applied in all fields of interest.
This is made possible by the world of abstraction, where our abstract tools are intentionally wrongly used.
And what makes up a computer program flow but abstraction.
I swear Lance just can't fade away can he....
Beware the Lollipop of Mediocrity, Lick it once and you suck forever.
I almost forgot the most important ingredient: Saltpeter ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It is possible that the chess equivalent of a lower-league football player could find incredible reserves of concentration and mental clarity for the first time in his career. It is equally possible that he could have solicited help in some imaginative form-
Take athletics as an example - an athlete who improves their personal best performances year on year has not yet reached their peak. But if they improve too much in one year, then the suspicion of drug-assistance is raised and they can be tested for that. Sometimes, the athlete is guilty, but the drug is so new that their tests return a negative result, so they are allowed to continue competing. Subsequent improvements in the test process allow for re-evaluation and retesting, and retrospective bans.
However, with a chess match, no such retrospective action can be taken because if the person cheated and was not caught, how are the invigilators (referees) going to retest? Was the cheating mechanism some kind of visual signal from the audience? If an audience is allowed to live-observe the games, you can have cameras on them, so that can be tested. But just about any other option involves the accused having some kind of signal receiver on their person, and that is not something that can be checked reliably retrospectively.
So if they are accused on the spot, then the onus must be on the accuser to prove the accusation on the spot. No proof? Then not guilty, resume the games.
What if they are not cheating? Some possibilities:
.
:>)
1 -- they learned chess mostly/exclusively by playing against a machine rather than against human opponents. Then their strategy would mostly be informed by or similar to the type of gameplay which they have observed kicking their own ass as they learned to play. Thus they might "play like a computer" because they have internalized the computer's algorithms as they learned to play chess.
2 -- they randomly play chess in manners that appear like a computer's algorithms. In fact, hey, when they say that the person's moves closely mirror the moves a computer would make, shouldn't they specify which computer program/algorithm they mean for making chess moves? If you're running gnu/linux, you can play Xboard ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xboard ) as the front-end (visual GUI) with multiple possible engines driving it underneath (such as Gnu chess). You can even run Xboard to provide a running analysis of a game being played by others as you enter the moves played (see the man pages for analysis options). Different engines would probably come up with different moves/styles of play, right? So saying that a person's moves and play style mirror a computer is an insufficiently detailed accusation. The chess engine being suspected ought to be specified and indicated, in my opinion.
3 -- yes it is strange that someone with a normally low rating would suddenly get so far against a grand-master, and yes it is less suspicious when that happens with a yougner player, but why couldn't it occur with an adult player? Suspicion is just suspicion, not evidence.
4 -- there is a comment in the article about using Faraday cages at the match in order to decrease the risk for cheating. Remember that these days computers are very small, smaller than a deck of cards (yes, fancy phone in your pocket, I'm talking about you being as powerful as a supercomputer from the 1970s or 1980s). They could rig a fancy interface for their toes and have a shoe computer for all that you know.
5 -- is this all fallout from the pete rose type stuff, or because of lance armstrong from yesterday?
A cheating scandal in chess. Wowza.
3 paragraphs in and I'm already annoyed by the excessive and awkward hyperlinking, e.g. linking to chessprofessionals.org via the word "the".
Someone is just butthurt over loosing and fishing for an excuse.
Stick him in a Faraday cage and not just any cage. Something that has at least 180dB attenuation from 100Khz-300Ghz and demonstrates solid resistance to both pulse and continuous wave modulation. That cage would need to be tested against an ultra-wide band radar system. Let's see if he performs as well under those conditions.
In any case one end up with a competition that is ultimately going to be destroyed by technology. Computers can play better than humans, so it is going to be all about who can outplay the computer. Like some many sports, it is not going to be who is the best, but who can be shown to be good, but not too good, as that would indicated cheating.
It is really pointless because in the real world we don't focus on who suceeds under lab conditions and with an arbitrary set of rules. It is who succeeds without causes excessive damage.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I think the following link is highly relevant to this discussion: http://imgur.com/gallery/Qi3u2
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Apparently, in chess circles, unless your rating exceeds your opponent, you must loose. If you don't, you must be cheating.
He's being haunted by the ghost of a grandmaster chess player!
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I just want to point out the obvious problem with cheating. If you cheat, you find yourself in positions where you are increasingly likely to need to cheat. The more you do it the more obvious it should be because you're going to be playing against people that are out of your league.
Hold the tournament on a commercial airliner that repeatedly takes off and lands. Certainly if someone on board the plane was using an electronic device during take off or landing something terrible would happen ;)
Grrrrr... don't bother me, I'm thinking.
Plenty of above-audible and below-audible bandwidth below 100 khz as well.
Then some wag will get a quantum link going, doesn't use EM at all, and so much for the Faraday cage.
And so it goes.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
All of this is irrelevant, because in the end, the computer makes a move against a particular position, and if it's effective, you can learn from it. It doesn't matter how it came up with the move. And if the computer is all you learn from, you're going to play like it.
That you can not internalize the algorithm does not mean you cannot internalize the moves.
Ah, so that's what this is about.
is not to play.
Who the hell cares about Chess?
Is that the one with the birds or the little old lady?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Jr0J8SPENjM
Like many of you, I was skeptical that it was cheating at first, but after watching this interesting analysis I am convinced.
Any ex post facto analysis designed after observation of experimental outcome is suspect. Deal a random bridge hand then calculate the odds of getting that hand (in the order dealt) - it's only 1 in 52 factorial, ~ 10^-68 - obviously that hand wasn't random. Moral: designing the test after observing the experiment, is an intellectual jerk off. And yeah, this does applies to MBAs doing "data mining."
Over the board (OTB) is one thing, but online (c)heating becomes incredibly hard to detect in situ, for pretty obvious reasons. The online chess community has taken a couple of approaches to detect this. For PlayChess Online (a server that hosts online games), they try to detect if your computer is running another process that is a known Chess Engine while you are playing your game. Easily subverted by having two computers, or even a Virtual Box setup.
The most successful way to detect cheating is in postmortem review. I worked with the ICC/FICS Slow Time Control league team (one guy usually) who would run move correlation statistics off suspicious games. There were lots of parameters in his analysis to tweak: ignore book (pre-planned) openings, use endgame tables, tolerance threshold, plys deep to look, how many branches to examine, etc. I was part one of the peer reviewers of the system and an occasional game. The basic idea was to run the moves through a few engines and find out how high the move correlation was for both players. In certain points of the game, the move correlation is very high because good candidate moves are obvious. However, over a single 35move game (avg), GM correlation with any of the popular chess engines (even HIARCS, which supposedly plays more like a human) was around 23%. 1800 level players (club level) were even less. Magnus Carlsen wasn't on the scene yet; he apparently learned more from the computer than any human. Perhaps he'd be higher. The typical cheater scored around 98%.
This of course is not to say that there couldn't be a player who "thought like a computer". But this would put in question the main criticism of game specific AI, and general AI, that they do not actually model how the human brain thinks. Finding a human who thought like a computer would actually be incredibly interesting to the whole field of AI. That being said, the burden at that point is on the cheater to prove because he is well beyond a reasonable doubt.
Not really the same environment but the Internet Chess Club has also amazing ways to detect if you are cheating. Some people were caught after they got help from the Fritz software - it seems by analyzing the way you play (long games from, say, people who are not registered FIDE IM,GM etc...), ICC is able to detect that you are playing above your abilities...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Why would anyone bother to cheat at chess? It's a game for old men and Russians.
Setup a Fool's mate intentionally. A cheater using an auto-play program will fall for it at no time. A human cannot spot a fool's mate that fast. As long as the game is finished (checkmate or not) within 30 seconds since it started, the game will not count as rated.
New Economic Perspectives
Many comments suggest that the differences between the play of human and computers. A good human player will generally come up with some kind of plan and follow up with moves that are consistent with that plan. In practice, he may have to respond to his opponent's play. There may be direct threats that he cannot ignore or he may find a need to come up with a new plan when it has become apparent that the original plan is no longer workable. Chess programs generally perform an exhaustive search through sequences of moves and select the move that leads to the best evaluation of the position that arises after the opponent has made the best moves (as determined by the result of the evaluation). Consequently, computers tend to be deadly in tactical situations; oversights by the opponent are ruthlessly exploited. Also, they often defend difficult positions well; sometimes by finding moves that appear, at first sight, to be ridiculous to a human. However, a major weakness of computer chess programs concerns the evaluation criteria. If a forced checkmate is available, this is obviously going to be the preferred choice. In the absence of this possibility, material is easy to measure and, as a result, tends to be heavily weighted; this is reflected in the decidedly materialistic play play of most computer programs. However, other positional considerations are more subtle and a good human player can be at an advantage here. For example doubled pawns are usually considered to be a weakness (the pawns cannot form a chain where each pawn is protected by another). However, there may be ample compensation; the pawns may control critical squares and the accompanying half open file may be put to good use by the rooks. In this, and many other situations, the assessment of whether a particular feature of a position is good or bad depends on many factors and will change as the position evolves with further moves. In this example, the doubled pawns might be desirable in the middle game, but a liability in the endgame where their vulnerability becomes important. A strong human player will have ability to make good judgements as to the implications of his potential choices. Computers are generally much weaker in this respect. In closed positions, it is not unusual to see computers making aimless moves, for example indecisively moving a piece back and forth between two squares, whereas the strong human player will try to find a plan for gradually improving his position and forcing positional concessions on the part of his opponent. Also, computers will sometimes leave their king weakly defended while they pursue material advantage elsewhere on the board. The result is that there are definite differences in the style and conduct of the play between strong humans and computer programs.
Its only a game, so just take the money out of it, and people will play it for fun, not for money, and the cheaters will give up.
Once computers got better at chess than Humans, any sane person surely lost interest in the pastime.
How can cheating possibly be stopped? Assuming that the player who wishes to cheat cannot carry sufficient computing power hidden on the person, only one way. By having the match played in secret- only the players and one trusted observer/official.
No other scheme works, when we can embed devices into the body of a player that receive suggestions from external calculation machines. If the incentive is great enough, our modern age makes this form of cheating impossible to prevent, if any form of live audience is allowed.
Unfortunately, unlike sports, cheating definitively spoils games of mental skill. But then, there is ZERO reason to take such competitions seriously in the first place. They should be for fun, not for big prizes. The corruption of purpose is the incentive to cheat.
So, if he stalls before making the checkmate, then he is somehow not cheating? If he is an accomplished speed chess player and isntantly sees the opening, then he must be a cheater?
I've encountered this several times in my career and can spot it immediately, just as easily as I can spot a queens gambit, for example. To say that I am cheating because I immediately capitalize on your foolish opening is pure rubbish.
Computer dominance of chess will surely end when tournament organizers realize how rampant doping is, and kick those silicon fuckers out.
Yup, I use the same trick. Or play them multiple times and see if they continue using fools mate instead of varying the opening.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
That's total bullshit. Any player that knows what a fools mate is can spot it in a heart beat. You're opening the king bishops pawn FFS -- one of the most common points of attack by white against black in Kings Pawn Openings.
But you did say Yahoo chess -- so that explains this useless as fuck solution and why you probably think it "works" to indicate anything.
u mad bro?
Relax there grizzly. The point is the computer program ALWAYS play fools mate. Because the game ends so fast, it doesn't count against your rating, so a human has an incentive NOT to mate that quickly. Games that end under 15 seconds are disregarded.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
I think the point is that it works as a CAPTCHA. The humans are aware that leaving yourself open to fools' mate is a CAPTCHA, and wait a few seconds before playing it to demonstrate that they're human; the bots aren't yet advanced enough and play the mate instantly.
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
It won't be long when we start getting neural-computer implants. What then, when computer assistance becomes part of ourselves? Chess as a game will be beneath us (though some may still play, neural linkers off, for fun). Hopefully we'll be able to find a strategy game suited to our levels.
I personally don't see the point playing a mechanically simple game, handicapping ourselves by removing computers. We ARE our tools, more than any other species. I would much rather see a mechanically superior game that requires computer assistance to play well. Just imagine: different players relying on different computer helpers, and even some players playing specifically to trip up certain algorithms. That'll leave us to do what we do best: using our tools to maximum effect and in creative ways, as opposed to memorizing a bunch of openings and situations and trying to think algorithmically many moves ahead (which is what chess demands).
No one was accused of using steroids.
This guy could have studied his opponents, he could suddenly understand the game in a new way, or the competitors in the tournament could share some fundamental link to a decision tree he's found. I'll admit this is unlikely, but one can attribute such vast differences to not only cheating or genius, but also competitive stagnation.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
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at least not yet. They follow algorithms. A game is way more than algorithms.
It's emotions and conventions like fear and excitement, having a poker face, intimidating chitchat, joking, awareness of losing or of losing face, anger or disappointment for failing strategy; also bodily functions (distractions) like sweating, being cold, nausea, annoyed at a small draft aso.
A grand master's move is not just the what but the how and the why. Computers still just do the first. They are not artists because they have no self-identity, pride, integrity etc. No "soul" if you like.
Yes, a computer may cook a meal but is not a chef. At least not yet.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Tape delay it so you don't let people outside know a move until the opponent has made their subsequent move.
aka Automaton Chess Player.
How about when they are granted super-user access and can see everyone's hole cards? Can't help but remember the Absolute Poker and Full Tilt cheating scandals. Correlating moves was eventually how the culprits were caught. But only well after the fact.